Enjoying the glory of our cricket team winning the inaugural Test Cricket World Cup is a magical moment for sport in this country, and one that we cricket fans can savour for a long time. It almost takes away the bad taste of the other sporting announcement this week; almost, but not quite. I refer, of course to Laurel Hubbard being allowed to compete as a female weightlifter in the Tokyo Olympics. This has a bad taste that will last for some time.
If Hubbard wins, as seems inevitable considering their (?) overwhelming physical advantages, I won’t be cheering. In fact, I won’t be watching, and I sincerely hope that all the other women in the same competitive class decide to boycott the event. Let’s face it, they might as well; what exactly do they have to lose?
The Telegraph UK has written a scathing article about Hubbard. Read and weep, fellow New Zealanders. We always pride ourselves on punching above our weight, not on cheating our way to the top of sport.
Girls and women are under attack as never before. I don’t just mean physical assault, although that darkness never goes away. I mean the elimination of the very words by which we describe ourselves and, by extension, the essence of who we are.
Ah, step this way for a preview of forthcoming non-binary attractions… New Zealand has just selected trans weightlifter Laurel Hubbard for the forthcoming Olympic Games in Tokyo. The 43-year-old, who transitioned in 2012, having previously competed under her birth name of Gavin, was a mediocre male athlete who immediately became an off-the-charts female one.
Of course she did. Being born a boy, and going through puberty as a male, bestows enormous advantages in terms of bigger joints and muscular strength. I have no problem with Hubbard or anyone else becoming a woman.
But a line has to be drawn when you are stealing the dreams of athletes who didn’t get your rocket-booster of testosterone as a teenager. It is not transphobic to point out that this is what is commonly known as cheating.
The New Zealand Olympic Committee says that Hubbard met the requirements to compete in the international games, and that it had taken great trouble to balance “human rights with fairness on the field of play”. The Kiwi team, it insists, has a “strong culture of… inclusion and respect for all”.
I’m happy to report that its neighbours in Oz are having none of it. Save Women Sports Australia went straight for the place where the balls generally hang out, accusing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) of betraying their sex. “Women are not a hormone level, nor are we a self-declaration of a ‘female gender identity’. Shame on them!”
Well said, binary Sheilas with vaginas. Before you know it, every Tom, Dick and Harriet will be entering female events and women’s sport will be killed stone dead.
It was a shameful period when the IOC and other sporting bodies turned a blind eye to women built like Russian tanks causing tidal waves as they pummelled through the pool, or hurled the shot into a neighbouring county. Hundreds of female athletes were cheated out of their rightful medals by young women who were the victims of horrifying experiments designed to boost their masters’ prestige.
“It can’t happen again to even one female,” says Davies. “I am pro everyone doing sport, but I feel sex, not self-identified gender, should be how we compete.”
Sport, which bends over backwards to ensure a level playing field via rigorous drug testing, simply cannot permit a whole new level of unfairness. But this isn’t about sport any more; it’s politics. Talking about Hubbard’s selection, Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, said disingenuously: “All parties here have simply followed the rules.” Even worse, Judith Collins, Conservative opposition leader, who should know better, added: “She is who she is, and she’s trying to do her very best. I’d hate to see any bullying or any horrible comments about Laurel because she’s doing what she wants to do.
See how the Left silences dissent. Legitimate objections to something most people would find absurd, even abhorrent, is called “bullying”. If we exclude Hubbard from the Olympics, the argument goes, we hurt her feelings, which apparently trumps the concerns of thousands of female athletes who fear that their careers are about to be thrown under the bus of political correctness.
Sharron Davies, Martina Navratilova and other great athletes who have dared to speak out have been subjected to abuse. But, hey, that’s the wrong kind of bullying. What matters is that Hubbard is “doing what she wants to do” and we must all bow down before that blatant injustice for a more just world.
Sorry, no. Not happening. Are women, once again, supposed to collude in our own weakness and irrelevance to satisfy the ambitions of a former man?
Laurel Hubbard may well take the gold in Tokyo, but fair-minded people will not cheer her. We will not stand by and see grossly unfair advantage that’s tantamount to cheating rebranded as fairness.
The Telegraph UK
How refreshing to read an opinion piece that is not politically correct and I agree with every word. It saddens me to see us being pilloried in overseas media, but I think it is deserved for this dreadful decision.
No doubt, as time goes on, different decisions will be made about transgender athletes competing in sport, otherwise women’s sport will be decimated. By that time, though, nothing will alter the fact that Laurel Hubbard still holds a gold medal, in the same way that Florence Griffith-Joyner never had her medals taken away in the era of drug-riddled sports. It is wrong, but it is going to happen anyway.
At least we won the cricket fair and square.
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